Tag Archive: piracy

Notorious Pirate site Movie2k.to is gone…at least for now Some good news for indie filmmakers whose work is routinely stolen online. As of now, the popular pirate portal http://www.movie2k.to is offline thanks, it seems to a court order issued in the UK. According to a story in Torrent Freak earlier this month a number of UK ISPs were …

Over the past months, as I’ve journeyed across the web investigating pirate websites I found that many shared something in common (besides stealing content to profit off the work of others). Along with illegal downloads to popular movies, often times the sites deliver pop-up ads for MacKeeper software, a product of Silicon Valley based Zeobit. Ads …

Need more evidence that Google’s YouTube earns income from pirates who upload (and monetize) films for which they don’t own the rights? Well, here’s another example I found today (1/26/13). This time it’s a YouTube user with the moniker “iWatchEpicMovies.” The film in question (one of many the uploaded claimed by the user) is …

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” — Sir Walter Scott Surprise, surprise–Google announced today that its profits “surged” this quarter thanks to an increase in online advertising revenue. A company press release heralded the news: We ended 2012 with a strong quarter,” said Larry Page, CEO of Google. …

Black markets are endemic in criminal culture, so it’s not much of a surprise, given the popularity of Internet commerce, that an illicit economy thrives online. By now we’ve grown accustomed to finding pirated content and counterfeit products marketed on web sites across the world. What’s disturbing is how entwined (and dependent) some of these …

I was on YouTube recently and came across another, not so surprising, downside to their content monetization. At first I’d noticed some movie trailers that were uploaded, claimed, and monetized by entities other than the studios/rights holders. Now it’s not surprising that folks upload trailers that aren’t theirs, claim it and make money off it. …

Today I came across a blog post published by Chris Kornelis in the Seattle Weekly, “It’s Time for Artists to Fight Piracy as Vigorously as They’ve Challenged Pandora.” Kornelis asserts,”One of the year’s most peculiar yet persistent music-industry trends has been the way legitimate forms of digital-music consumption have been vilified more strongly than illegitimate ones.” As …

In a move that’s long overdue, Google has announced a change to the search algorithm it uses to “rank” websites listed in search results, lowering the ranking of the most egregious pirate sites. In a posting on their “Inside Search” blog Amit Singhal explains the move: We aim to provide a great experience for our …

The Trichordist “Artists for an Ethical Internet” blog recently featured an eloquent piece by musician David Lowery written in response to an NPR blog post by Emily White. Anyone interested in the issue of creator’s rights should read and share this piece. It speaks for itself-read it here. Recently Emily White, an intern at …